It is unusual for European leaders, allies in the EU and in Nato, to criticise one another publicly, especially when standing next to them. But when Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, came to Brussels last week to fight his corner, three European presidents made a point of keeping him at a distance.

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Orbán, a strongman leader for the past five years who embraces controversy and confrontation as his preferred mode of politics, is Europe’s foremost exponent of tough exclusion policies in the midst of the continent’s biggest refugee crisis.

He denies there is a crisis, despite figures showing that more than half of the arrivals in Europe this year are Syrians fleeing war and persecution. He states bluntly that Muslims are not wanted in Hungary, that he is defending the EU’s external frontier as a Christian against a Muslim invasion. A gifted orator, he uses hyperbole and alarmism to great effect, pandering to popular prejudices. Tens of millions of migrants are coming, he contends, to a continent in which the natives will end up as the minority.

Donald Tusk, president of the European council, said Orbán was being unchristian in stoking a clash of civilisations between the west and Islam. Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European commission, and Martin Schulz, head of the European parliament, voiced their disagreements with a leader revelling in the spotlight and relishing his role as Europe’s leading bad boy.

But apart from occasionally shaking their heads and holding their noses in Orbán’s company, there is little they are inclined do either to isolate him or force him to change his ways. “He hasn’t broken any laws,” said a senior EU official.

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In a speech in Brussels on Monday evening, Tusk’s recommendations on how to tackle the refugee crisis were more moderately phrased, but entirely in line with the Hungarian’s emphasis on tough security measures, closing the borders and keeping people out.

Frans Timmermans, the commission’s No 2 and its ‘enforcer’, recently delivered a speech on the rule of law in Europe and repeatedly referred to the problem of Hungary under Orbán. He made it plain he was reluctant to sanction the government in Budapest by, for example, invoking EU treaty provisions depriving a member state of its voting rights.

This was done once before by Brussels, against Austria in the 1990s when the late far-right leader, Jörg Haider, entered government. “The case of Austria weakened the EU’s capacity to react,” said Timmermans. “It was a political response which completely backfired. Since then member states have been reluctant to take issue with other member states.”

If EU governments hesitate to denounce their peers, the political party system in the EU helps them. Orbán is widely seen as an authoritarian nationalist shifting towards the far right, but his party, Fidesz, is part of the family of Christian Democrats, which make up the European People’s party (EPP) in the European parliament, dominated by Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel.

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Berlin and Budapest are fiercely critical of each other over immigration – Orbán described the influx as “not a European problem, but a German problem”. But Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party has done little to put pressure on Orbán. The EPP’s other big problem figure in recent years was Silvio Berlusconi when he was prime minister of Italy. Eventually Merkel helped to topple him.

But for the political leaders of Europe, nothing is prized more highly than power and electoral success. And here Orbán is peerless. Not even Merkel, coasting towards a fourth term if she wants it, can hold a candle to him. She has to rule through coalitions and sharing power. Orbán, in office since 2010 and not facing re-election until 2018, has a whopping majority, just short of two-thirds. He has the strongest electoral mandate in the EU. He has no competition beyond the neo-fascist Jobbik movement, which is now the biggest opposition party.

Hungary has built a fence at its border with Serbia. Photograph: Zoltan Gergely Kelemen/EPA

The Americans are less fussy. Last year, they blacklisted several senior Hungarian government officials, barring them from the US for alleged corruption and “kleptocracy” in a unique move against a Nato ally and an EU state.

Such a move is inconceivable in the EU, not least since many national leaders would balk at setting the precedent for fear that the penalties could then be used against others.

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Orbán does not have a good word to say about modern Europe, whose response to the refugee issue is “madness”, he said last week. He has put up a razor-wire fence on the border with Serbia, and warned he might repeat the exercise on the frontier with Croatia, which, unlike Serbia, is an EU member state. He is putting the army on the borders and fast-tracking new laws criminalising immigrants, which on Monday triggered the resignation of his defence minister.

Orbán has used his power to write a new constitution, cow the media, stuff the constitutional court with supporters, purge the foreign ministry and the diplomatic corps, restructure parliament and gerrymander electoral districts. He mocks European notions of liberal democracy, and voices admiration for Vladimir Putin in Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey.

But he has plenty of quiet admirers in central Europe and the Balkans, where leaders increasingly see Orbán as a man to emulate, rather than isolate. Given the rise of radicalism and populism of left and right and the shrinking of the centre in European politics, there are many who see in Orbán Europe’s future, and not a hangover from history.